The Practice of Giving Feedback to Improve Teaching

Abstract

Although the vast majority of colleges and universities claim teaching as their as their primary mission, recent studies have expressed diasppointment with American higher education. Over the past decade, number of individuals and organizations have found pressed for substantive change in higher education [1, 11, 52[. Consistently these reports have critized the quality of postsecondary instruction and have clamored for the improvement of teaching. Among all instructional development efforts, the most promising way of fundamentally changing postsecondary teaching is to provide faculty with individualized formative feedback. In this process, information about an instructor's teaching is collected, summarized, and fed back to the faculty member. Although this method has been found to be extremely powerful, it has not been consistently successful [19, 50], possibly because many who feed back the information to the teacher are not trained in feedback-giving practice [13]. Although there exists an abundance of literature about feedback to improve teaching, most studies focus on the kind of information that is fed back to the instructor rather than the process by which the instructor receives the information. Rarely do researchers observe the way in which information is conveyed to instructors, and fewer still analyze this process [12]. Thus review of the literature on feedback was undertaken to extrapolate feedback-giving practices that may be effective in helping postsecondary teachers to improve their teaching. Method of Analysis Literature pertaining to feedback in the fields of education, psychology, and organizational behavior was reviewed. From this literature, pertinent theoretical pieces, empirical studies, and prior reviews of the literature were analyzed in order to determine the state of the art in the practice of giving feedback. Readers are cautioned on the degree of confidence that can be placed on some findings of this review. First, because all of the literature was not derived from the fields of education and faculty development, the findings may not be as generalizable to the teaching improvement process as expected. Psychology students as research subjects differ considerably from postsecondary faculty; likewise, business and industrial settings are quite different from college and university settings. However, related studies from education, psychology, and organizational behavior were included when the underlying issues of the study seemed to be applicable to faculty in teaching improvement setting. Second, because all of the literature was not derived from empirical studies but also included theoretical and consensual pieces, some findings may command greater confidence than others. However, when the theory seemed logical or the consensus was broad-based, they were included; to ignore them seemed short-sighted. Organizing the Literature. Ilgen, Fisher, and Taylor [41] conceptualize feedback as a special case of the general communication process in which some sender (hereafter referred to as source) conveys message to recipient (p. 350, italics in original). Therefore, giving feedback can be considered an event. One effective method for understanding events is to ask the essential W questions: who, what when, where, why, and how. In article, who denotes the players in the event, the feedback source and the feedback recipient. What denotes the information that is fed back to the feedback recipient. When denotes the occasion upon which the information is fed back. Where denotes the location in which the information is fed back. Why denotes the reason that the information is fed back. How denotes the manner in which the information is given and received. Why feedback is being given and received is not answered within the scope of this article. The majority of the studies reviewed do not explicitly or implicitly discuss why the feedback was given. …